This disclosure relates to fan spacers, annulus fillers or fan platforms for use in jet engines or other turbo engines.
Jet engines are used to power and provide thrust for an aircraft. These jet engines typically include a gas turbine that intakes air at a front end, compresses the air within a compressor section of the engine, injects fuel into the compressed gas, combusts this gas to produce a high-pressure, high velocity gas, and expels this gas out through a turbine section. In a jet engine the compressor and turbine elements are disposed along a single shaft that substantially runs the length of the engine and also supports a fan near its front end. During operation of the engine, the turbine drives rotation of the shaft, which causes the rotation of both the compressor and the fan. As the blades of the fan rotate, they propel air which generates the majority of the thrust of the engine. In most cases, a significant portion of the air moved by the fan is bypass air, which does not flow through the gas turbine section of the engine.
A typical fan section of an engine includes an annular-shaped fan case and the front end of the shaft that supports the various fan blades which extend in a generally radial direction from the shaft toward the fan case. At the front end of the shaft, there is initially a nose cone which directs the flow of air as it enters the intake of the fan before the fan blades. To further control the flow of air about the roots of the fan blades, at the downstream end of the nose cone, there are usually fan spacers (also known as annulus fillers or fan platforms) that span the circumferential gaps between the roots of the blades.